


So Low Down

by celeste9



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Dysfunctional Relationships, F/M, Femdom, Future Fic, Inappropriate Use of the Force, Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Secret Relationship, Sexual Content, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-13
Packaged: 2019-06-10 01:24:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15280506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/celeste9/pseuds/celeste9
Summary: Rey is not a Jedi and she has no teacher, but after Crait she learns what she can do, testing her boundaries, pushing herself farther than she knows a Jedi would approve of. Poe gives himself to her to use, fear and lust twisting together within him, perhaps a strange method of coping with his memories of another Force user who pushed themselves into his head.Together they can burn the First Order down, but they may break each other along the way.





	So Low Down

**Author's Note:**

> Title from The Gaslight Anthem. In case it needs to be said, not a fluffy fic.

Rey knows it’s wrong.

She remembers how violating it had felt, to be on the other end. She remembers the feeling of powerlessness, until she had discovered it didn’t have to be that way.

Poe does not have that luxury. He cannot force her out, and he cannot push himself into her head instead.

But he can say no. If he said no, she would stop.

He never says no.

She reaches out her hand, and he freezes in place. His eyes go wide, and his pulse flutters in his neck. He is frightened; she does not need the Force to see that, though his fear bleeds out more recognizably because she does. He is frightened, and he is remembering before, Jakku, and Kylo Ren, but when she reaches out she knows he is also thinking,  _ Rey, Rey, Rey,  _ and lust thrums in his veins to blend with the fear.

She cannot deny that she likes the way it feels, the power, the control, and that is the part that scares her. She could do so much bad with this.

But with Poe, he is afraid, but he wants her, too. He is afraid that she could hurt him but that seems to be part of the draw anyway; he is excited by the power she has over him.

All of this Rey can see, when she pushes, seeking tendrils laced throughout his mind. He pushes back against her, his brain scrambling for a way to fight her, but he can’t, not really. So Rey sees, and she uses it.

As Rey holds him in place she steps forward, stroking the back of her hand down his cheek, and Poe swallows. He shudders, very slightly, muscles struggling to move, but he cannot overpower her. When they touch she can feel more deeply the way fear and lust mingles within him and combines into something stronger, fiercer, and when she reaches between his legs he moans in the back of his throat.

Rey smiles at him with a feral edge and knows she will not stop because he will not ask her to.

-

Poe knows it’s wrong.

He knows he never dealt with what happened to him on his mission to retrieve the map, just pushed it to the back of his mind and kept going, ignoring the worst parts and using his anger to fuel him in the assault on Starkiller and beyond, mocking General Hux over an open communication channel to soothe his own bruised pride. There were worse ways to cope, he figured, and he didn’t have time for… for personal reflection, or falling apart, or anything.

He considers that this, too, is a sort of coping.

Rey is beautiful, and she terrifies him.

She is good, he knows. She is filled with a bright light, compassionate desire and hopefulness. But she also burns with fierce, fierce anger, a well of power she is only beginning to understand and that in the wrong circumstances, she could use to tear the galaxy apart.

When the edges of that power brush against him, questing into his head, forcing him to do as she wishes, it feels like Kylo Ren. He feels as he did on Jakku, and on the  _ Finalizer,  _ powerless in a way he had never felt in his life, like he was outmatched in every way possible, and that he could say what he wanted but it would never make a difference. He could not give up and still be able to do nothing to help himself.

The part that shames him is that he  _ wants  _ it.

The first time she squeezed around his neck it made him so hard he thought he would come in his pants like a boy. She held him to the bed and explored, as he quivered with need, and when he finally came, her curious hands on his dick and her teeth on his neck, he thought maybe he had never felt so good in his life.

He doesn’t know why she makes him feel this way, like he wants her to bend him to her will even as the thought scares him. The things she could do to him, if she chose, and he would never be able to resist.

He can tell her no. He knows she would stop.

He is ashamed, but he doesn’t want to stop, and he never says no.

-

Poe is solid and sturdy when he lies above her, or beneath her, but he feels fragile and breakable when Rey reaches out with the Force. He has no defense against her ability and it is gloriously intoxicating, knowing what she could do, the power she has over him. She understands the thrill the Dark Side must offer, the lack of consequence, the knowledge that you can do whatever you want and no one can stop you.

It is a rush, to see how far she can go, to test what she can do, and it is yet still a rush to pull herself back. To exert control over herself is a thrill in its own way. She is still learning to listen to what the Force wills and she knows she skirts too close to what Kylo is, bending it rather than seeking to bend herself.

But she is learning.

Poe’s cheeks redden when she closes her fist, choking him without even a finger to his throat as she kneels above his hips. He digs into her waist with blunt fingernails, the pads of his fingertips leaving bruises on her skin. She could stop him, could make his arms fly back to his sides and hold them there, but she likes the way the bruises look, later, when she looks at herself.

“I don’t want to be like him,” Rey murmurs, releasing the pressure on Poe’s throat.

He gasps and wheezes, and pulls her close. His mouth is warm; his lips are soft.

“You aren’t like him,” he breathes into her mouth. He always knows what she means, even if she hardly says it aloud. “And this isn’t… this isn’t like that.”

“I hope not,” Rey says, and finds the humor in it. “Don’t think I like sharing.”

He laughs, a bit short. “I like to be just yours,” he says. “You’re sexy when you’re in charge.”

This is a thrill, too, in itself. Before Poe, Rey knew nothing but her own touch, and even that had been a luxury, simple exploration when she was closed within her shelter during  _ X’us’R’iia _ . Poe has been a generous and enthusiastic teacher, and Rey likes that as well as she does her own personal education, when Poe sinks into submission as she does what she wills.

She rolls her hips and likes both the sensation against her groin and the way Poe’s eyelashes flutter, the way he clutches her hips. She drags his hands from her and pushes them over his head, then she releases him physically and keeps him pinned using the Force. He bucks against her, growling in his throat, and she can feel how hard he is.

Fear and lust, lust and fear; Poe hates to feel trapped and yet he craves this as much as Rey does. She bites his lip and tastes blood; she rubs against him until they both get off.

-

They tell no one because no one would understand. Maybe it’s shame, or guilt, but Poe thinks it doesn’t matter. They owe no one their privacy, and no one would understand.

Poe smiles at Rey and wonders how they can’t see what he means by it, but somehow they don’t. He smiles at her in public and then in private she holds him down without touching him and rides him until they both see stars.

Sometimes he wonders how far she would go, and he wonders if she even knows. 

He is something of an experiment to her, he realizes. She is testing her powers, exploring what she can do. She has no teacher and she knows that the Jedi would consider much of what she does to be an assault on the nature of their beliefs.

But Rey is no Jedi, as she often says.

Poe isn’t sure that’s true but she is certainly… different, from his childhood assumptions of the Jedi. She is warmer and more frightening at once, different even from Luke Skywalker, who had smiled at Poe and told him stories about Rogue Squadron, until he became more rumor than man even to the Damerons, searching for lost Jedi knowledge, starting a school, and finally disappearing altogether.

Rey is neither rumor nor myth; she is flesh and blood that Poe can hold and still feel like he has no claim to. She laughs at bad puns and she steals the blankets; she crackles with energy and shoots sparks from her fingers. 

She seems more surprised even than Poe is, the first time that happens, when she shocks him with lightning from her hands and he cries out. She doesn’t apologize but she withdraws, and later she tells him that Snoke had that power.

Poe knows that the Emperor did, too, and he has never heard of a Jedi to use it. He doesn’t say that to Rey.

-

Rey supposes, in a way, that Poe is her boyfriend. She has never had one but she thinks it must be something like this; they sleep in each others’ beds and she feels more contented when he is near. She enjoys his stories and he makes her laugh; she likes to do her repair work by his side with BB-8, passing tools between them.

But they don’t use those words, boyfriend, girlfriend, relationship, and they keep what they do a secret. Rey doesn’t like to think of how Finn would look at her if he knew what she does to Poe, what Poe lets her do, and she thinks that means it truly is wrong.

Maybe he isn’t her boyfriend, then, after all, not really. What they do together, shouldn’t she be unable to do any of it to someone she cares about? She should recoil at the violation instead of pressing farther; she shouldn’t lie awake as he sleeps and walk through his mind, seeing what she can see, slipping in and out of his memories and his fears and his desires.

She knows that the brush of her mind against his makes his skin crawl, because it reminds him of Kylo, of screaming on the  _ Finalizer _ as he gave up his most precious secret, and yet she still does it, uses him to become more skillful at picking out the details she needs from a foreign mind. She embeds herself in his head as he thrusts inside her because it makes his pleasure echo with hers, multiplying and intensifying even as she can feel the tremble of his fear twist in with his desire.

She shouldn’t treat him like this, like he is hers to use, but he still never says no, and she tastes the salt of his sweat on his skin. 

-

Rey doesn’t need to use her hands, Poe knows. She can hold him exactly where she wants without touching, and she gets better and better at it all the time, fine control and finesse, keeping multiple threads in place at once. 

When she uses her hands, Poe knows, it’s because she wants to.

His breath is short, his face buried between her legs, her knees bent over his shoulders and her hands tangled in his hair. He doesn’t dare to move back for a gasping breath, and he isn’t sure he could, with the fierce grip she has on him.

He isn’t sure he wants to, anyway. If he were to choke while giving her pleasure, it wouldn’t be such a bad way to go.

She is so quiet as he brings her off, nothing but faintly heavier exhales than normal, perhaps the tiniest of whines. Sometimes he wishes she would  _ shout,  _ wishes she would  _ scream,  _ but then, the walls are thin, and this is a secret.

It is a secret because how is he supposed to say that she reminds him of his nightmares and that turns him on?

He loathes the sensation of her creeping through his thoughts and yet craves it. She is not Kylo Ren and that makes it both better and worse; his attraction and lust confuses in his head with pain and shame until he doesn’t know what is about his own issues and what is about his feelings for Rey, whether he wants her simply because he wants her or if it’s because Kylo Ren wrecked something in him in that cell on the  _ Finalizer,  _ and someone else who can do the same thing is the only way to breach that crack.

When he was younger he dated a guy who was into bondage; it wasn’t really Poe’s thing but he liked the way his partner was into it. After Jakku, the very memory of it, his hands bound, putting him entirely at the mercy of his lover, makes him recoil. He can’t be tied down. He can’t be helpless. 

(He had thought he would die in that room.)

But Rey does it to him all the time. She just doesn’t need rope or ties or binders.

He puts himself under her control and it feels simultaneously like the most right and the most wrong thing he has ever done.

-

She can control the lightning now, and sometimes she uses it when their tumbles are particularly rough. A short burst makes Poe hiss between his teeth and do anything she asks.

Rey knows the sorts of beings who would use such a technique, and given that that list includes Snoke and the Sith, she knows that she should not want her name on it, too. She knows why someone would use it, and to what purpose.

It is a terrible thing.

She tells herself that she would never use it like that. She would never use any of it like that. She is merely learning, learning herself, learning control, learning so that she may fight, so that they might win. It is not about power for power’s sake; she is not Kylo Ren. 

She is not.

But it isn’t right.

Her shame does not outweigh the thrill that shivers through her every time. She could use this on her enemies, on the Resistance’s enemies, she could use this to  _ win. _

But the pain on Poe’s face at even a small taste of it gives her pause.

After, she lies with him and asks, “Do you think there’s something broken in me, that makes me want to do these things? Broken, like Kylo?”

Poe’s hesitation means that he is considering, giving her question serious thought. “If there is,” he says finally, “then I must be broken, too, to want them.”

Rey should feel reassured but she doesn’t; she thinks maybe she is the one who broke Poe. Or perhaps she has made it worse; if Kylo broke him first, Rey has cracked him to the bone. She looks at the ceiling rather than at his face. She whispers, “What are we doing?”

He is quiet again, long enough that Rey thinks he has no answer, because there is no answer. They are wrong, and this is wrong, and lying together like they are normal doesn’t make it true.

Then he says, “Surviving, I guess.”

_ Surviving,  _ Rey thinks. She has survived her entire life.

But she wants more than survival, and this is about more. It has to be.

-

To burn the First Order down, Poe knows, they will need Rey.

He tells himself that’s why he does it. It isn’t about him. It’s about Rey becoming who she needs to be, the only one who could stand up to Kylo Ren. It’s nothing to do with him at all.

That’s what he tells himself, anyway, and it pushes the shame aside, the guilt that he wants these things that scare him, the idea that maybe he wants Rey because of what she could do to him.

He wears his mother’s ring around his neck and he used to dream of giving it to someone, someone he could love and cherish, someone he could start a family with. Now he dreams of Rey, when they are apart. He dreams of pressure on his throat and the way wariness makes heat pool low in his belly, the way he shivers with both desire and terror, the way she makes him feel, like no one else has before her.

He thinks the ring is not for him, not anymore. It promises a future he no longer belongs to.

Rey has a beautiful smile, and she is more beautiful still when she bares her teeth.

He dreams of her bringing Kylo Ren to kneel at his feet, as Ren made Poe do on Jakku.

He dreams of laying waste to the First Order, and Rey standing in the ashes. She could tear the galaxy apart and if it means crushing the First Order, he will give her whatever she needs.

He thinks he was better, once. But this isn’t about him.

-

Somehow Poe has become what Rey needs, and she is what he needs. He wears a ring around his neck when he flies, when he sleeps, when they fuck, but Rey knows Poe no longer believes in the promise behind it, and she thinks she could never be the one who deserved it even if he did. Maybe once. Maybe if they had not fed the fractures in each others’ souls.

Instead, here they are. She squeezes tight on his throat until he loses his breath and when she releases him, he fucks her against the wall and gasps,  _ thank you, thank you. _

She hasn’t seen Kylo Ren since Crait, and she assumes that means their connection is broken. She doesn’t know if it has something to do with Snoke’s death, or if Kylo found a way to sever it, or if it is lying dormant, or any of a thousand possible other explanations. She only knows that it is as good as gone, and she is glad for it.

Poe is a big enough secret to keep, without complicating it with Kylo.

As though, she thinks, nearly amused, Kylo has not complicated things already. His history with her, with Poe, his very existence.

Rey doesn’t know if Kylo is beyond saving but she does know that it isn’t up to her. If she needs to face him, she will be ready now. She has had no true teacher but Poe has been what she needed, allowing her to learn and explore and grow, to push herself farther than she thinks most teachers would have wanted. (Aside, maybe, from Kylo himself.) She has never been afraid of Kylo Ren but now she understands what it will take to stand against him.

In her more vicious moods, when Poe comes back from missions bloodied and dirty, when the First Order has killed someone she cares about, when they fuck rough and hard, she whispers into Poe’s ear that she will bring their heads to lay at his feet, she will throw Kylo Ren himself to Poe to do with as he wishes. Poe shudders against her and growls; he flips her over, spreads her legs and eats her out until she can’t remember why she was so furious.

Sometimes when Rey walks Poe’s mind she can see that he dreams of that, Kylo on his knees, Rey a victorious vengeful warrior, the two of them together. She can see that he is ashamed of this but Rey thinks that’s okay; she is ashamed by the way she wants it, too.

She is no Jedi.

-

General Hux’s Star Destroyer is still burning in the atmosphere, debris raining down; Poe watches it like he used to watch fireworks as a small child only with more satisfaction. He hopes Hux knew it was him.

The planet will be a graveyard, like Jakku. Poe wonders how long it will take for the scavengers to begin scurrying through.

He pushes his hand through his sweaty hair and leaves the wreckage behind. BB-8 rolls near his feet as he walks; he can feel Rey closeby. 

She still terrifies him and he still doesn’t know how far she will go. He still needs her.

He finds her with bodies piled around her feet, sweaty and dirty, and she grins at him with all her teeth as she extinguishes her lightsaber. Knights of Ren, Poe thinks. She has made a gift of them, as she promised.

He kisses her and she tastes of blood; she sinks into his head, probing, and he can feel that she is as proud of him as he is of her.

Kylo Ren is gone; fled as the battle turned. It isn’t finished, not yet. But they are close.

“We burned them down,” she says, her nails pinching into his waist, and Poe knows this is wrong.

Nothing has ever felt more right.

**_End_ **


End file.
